Principal room features at Rancho de Cielo in Jeff Davis County include window heads detailed with plaster conchas, large carved ponderosa pine beams and slated wood viga ceilings.

Principal room features at Rancho de Cielo in Jeff Davis County include window heads detailed with plaster conchas, large carved ponderosa pine beams and slated wood viga ceilings.

Photo: Paul Hester, Photo By Paul Hester

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The study, made cozy with bookshelves, rustic beams and a stone wall, creates a buffer between public spaces and the adjoining master suite, says architect Michael G. Imber. TRACY HOBSON LEHMAN / EXPRESS-NEWS

The study, made cozy with bookshelves, rustic beams and a stone wall, creates a buffer between public spaces and the adjoining master suite, says architect Michael G. Imber. TRACY HOBSON LEHMAN / EXPRESS-NEWS

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The romantic flower room of the Southern Living Idea House in Marble Falls doubles as a laundry room.

The romantic flower room of the Southern Living Idea House in Marble Falls doubles as a laundry room.

Photo: Tria Giovan, Photo By Tria Giovan

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The architect looked to the Andalusia region of southern Spain and Moorish influences for Dos Suenos, a Hill Country house outside San Antonio whose arrival court features a Mudejar star-shaped fountain, a boldly scaled zaguan arch and a walled entry garden.

The architect looked to the Andalusia region of southern Spain and Moorish influences for Dos Suenos, a Hill Country house outside San Antonio whose arrival court features a Mudejar star-shaped fountain, a

“There's no such thing,” says the San Antonio architect, whose residential work is celebrated in a gorgeous new coffee-table book titled “Ranches, Villas and Houses” from the respected New York art book publisher Rizzoli.

Add a third prestigious Palladio Award for traditional design and current building projects from Telluride to Costa Rica, and 2013 is turning out to be a pretty good year for the small firm based in Olmos Park.

“You see architects that have a specific style that says, 'This is what we do,'” Imber says. “That's not us. We're problem-solvers.”

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Meet the client's needs (which involves a lot of conversation).

Marry the building with the landscape (which requires a lot of contemplation and sketching skill).

Create an architecture that is meaningful to the client and the culture (which means research of the region where the project is located).

If there is a tie that binds Imber's designs, it is a sense of permanence.

Whether it is the La Dolce Vita complex in Roswell, N.M., with roots that can be traced back to ancient Rome, or Rancho Dos Vidas in Frio County, with its echoes of Mission Espada, an Imber building looks as if it has been there for a long time. Moreover, it looks like it belongs there.

“Generally, architects are no longer educated in the language of architecture,” says Imber, a 52-year-old with a neat moustache and goatee, his genial face framed by straight gray hair that parts naturally in the middle. “When a client wants a traditional building, they'll look at bits and pieces and place elements — almost like Mr. Potato Head.”

Imber's elegant work — built on a foundation of native stone, stucco, wood and iron by regional crafstmen — reflects a deep respect for history, landscape and the continuum of architecture.

“His work is beautifully crafted and unabashedly romantic,” says architect Ted Flato of San Antonio's Lake-Flato Architects, which leans much more toward the modern. “His work is rooted in the great traditions of architecture but is very much a part of where we now live. And he has a beautiful hand, meaning he can draw very well, very fluidly, which allows an appreciation of the nuances of architectural tradition.”

Reared in West Texas, Imber early on admired the simple proportions of the Pueblo village and frontier settlements such as Fort Davis that he encountered on family vacations.

For his fifth-year thesis project at Texas Tech University, Imber designed a Texas dude ranch; his body of student work earned him a fellowship to travel in Europe, where his admiration of classical architecture deepened.

Back in the States, Imber joined the Washington, D.C., firm of noted classicist Allan Greenberg, who emphasized history and nuts-and-bolts skills such as drawing and drafting. The South African believed that “architecture is like a river and its many branches influence its course.” Imber was baptized in that river.

Returning to Texas, Imber found a kindred collective spirit in San Antonio and went on his own in 1992.

Branching out from residential to commercial, recent projects include a high school, a boutique hotel, a clubhouse and the Vistana lofts on the western edge of downtown San Antonio.

Imber is a leading proponent of the New Urbanism, a place-making philosophy that promotes walkable neighborhoods like those that existed before the automobile took over our lives.

He is a great admirer of the stone mason, the carpenter and the ironsmith; he has mixed grout with reddish sand from a local riverbed and carved a limestone lintel with a mustang grapevine design to root a building to its surrounding landscape.

“He begins his designs by considering the land through watercolors and then develops his ideas in relation to climate and local historical references,” writes Elizabeth Dowling, professor emerita of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology and author of “Ranches, Villas and Houses.”

With architectural inspirations ranging from the Roman temple to the hacienda to the German Sunday house to the octagonal Czech meeting house — tempered by modern lifestyles, materials and methods — Imber designs buildings that, according to his colleague Marc Appleton, principal of Appleton & Associates Architects Inc. of California, “are not only rich in cultural iconography but in their attention to the craftsmanship that was typical of those building precedents.”

For Imber, also a principal in Austin-based Mohon-Imber Interiors, no detail is insignificant.

“Imber is a keen observer of details that reinforce the architectural concept,” Appleton writes in the new book. “One does not find a superficial pastiche of salvaged or store-bought materials and ornament but carefully researched and executed details that are integral to the larger idea. Very seldom are they self-consciously displayed but seem rather to be unassuming or natural parts of the overall fabric.”

In other words, no potato heads.

Imber is not insulted by words such as “romantic” or “nostalgic,” he says. He quotes Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”

“I define myself as a modern classicist,” Imber says. “We have to understand the language of the past, yet relate to the modern needs of our culture. We're not building museums to the past. We're interested in trying to understand who we are as people. Traditional architecture is so successful because it's generally doing what people want — not what architects want.”

In a world of ubiquitous buildings, of “international” style, of “architecture as data transference,” as Imber puts, the work of the so-called neoclassicists stands out — because it takes a step back.

“It is into this void that Imber's architecture intrudes and is making a difference,” Appleton writes, “suggesting that the future of architecture may lie closer to home than we imagined.”